Art People

IT MAY NOT be your idea of Lucullan, but a far‐out feast will be spread today and tomorrow at the 112 Workshop (112 Greene Street, between Prince and Spring), the bare‐boards experimental space in SoHo partly supported by national and New York State endowment money.

Working in blue gelatin, Toby BuOnagoria has created a flamingo “flavored” with neon tubing; Eric Appel has carved a life‐size rock‐candy version of St. Theresa, floating on edible cotton‐candy clouds; Richard Dimmler has filled an oversize Whitman candy box with chocolate genitals, and Jonathan Price will construct I Ching hexagrams out of calligraphic meringues baked with his own hands.

The feast‐art show has the mouthwatering title of “Now I Know Why Cannibals Eat Their Enemies” (we'll get back to that in a minute). The maitre d'hotel is Mr. Appel, a youngish sculptor who makes no bones about his enjoyment of eating. “I'd been doing some pieces relating to touch and the senses, and I thought, why not food as a medium?” Mr. Appel explained the other day. From there on, it was a piece of cake to round up a group of like‐minded artists (there are 26 exhibiting) and land a grant for the show.

“The idea is the interaction between the artist who feeds and the audience who consumes,” added Mr. Appel, helping artists to lay out their spaces at the gallery the other evening. “We get satisfaction out of our work and so can feed others. The title came from a dream I had about cannibals, who eat their enemies not for food but to possess their spirits. It could say something about the audience, which also consumes art for spiritual sustenance. And on another level, it's a comment on our society, because we devour each other all the time.”

More along those lines are several performance pieces. One is by Karen Robbins, a dancer, who'll weave through the show garbed as a vulture—the ultimate consumer. A video piece by, Robin Lee Crutchfield called “Mothers of America” comments on “the media's fallacies about motherhood.” On a television set atop a TV‐dinner tray, the screen boasts a cutout of Jayne Mansfield from “The Girl Can't Help It,” holding a milk bottle before each breast. Not without ambiguities either is a piece by Henny Garfunkle, a partner in the famed SoHo restaurant called Food. Costumed as an Egyptian slave girl, she'll serve fruits and vegetables to all, as a cassette repeats the words she mouths all day: May I help you? What would you like? Will that be all?”

The show is free and open from noon to 6, today and tomorrow. Eat, eat.

Joan Mondale, the art‐minded wife of the Vice President, is not yet ready to discuss her plans to initiate rotating exhibitions of American art and crafts at Admiral's House, the 84‐yearold Vice‐Presidential mansion that she and her family now occupy in Washington. But she's begun tossing ideas around with Martin Friedman, the director of the Walker Art Center in her home state of Minnesota.

“Of course, the Rockefellers are a hard act to follow,” Mr, Friedman said the other day, referring to the art works installed—and now removed—in the Vice‐Presidential mansion by the previous tenants. “But Mrs. Mondale has a strong commitment to American art. I think initially she might consider rotating groups of things owned by Midwestern museums, then go to museums throughout the country. The range will include every kind of art in the present and the recent past.”

Pressed for names, Mr. Friedman said, “Well, we're talking about people like David Smith” (the late sculptor, noted for his monumental works in welded metal). “My hope is there'll be a number of different styles and attitudes; younger artists as well as established, known and not‐so‐known, But nothing really hot off the easel.”

Henry Geldzahler, curator of 20thcentury art at the Metropolitan Museum, has added his name to the list of New York art people who won't attend the opening of the Centre Beaubourg in Paris on Monday night in protest against the French Government's release of Abu Daoud, the suspected Palestinian terrorist, several weeks ago.

Mr. Geldzahler was scheduled to act as courier for several paintings lent by the museum to the Beaubourg's opening exhibition. But, stressing that he was acting on his own behalf and not that of the Met, he said, “When people from the French radio started calling, and I was told that parties and limousines had been scheduled for me, I began to realize the French would make a big thing over my attending. So I decided to cancel.”

Instead of Mr. Geldzahler, the Met will send as its courier Lowery Sims, assistant curator of 20th‐century art.

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